I M M O B I L I S M | a labor of love lost and found (2010-2020)

I wrote these words a long time ago.

The final research obstacle I faced came from the very nature of my topic: my focusing on public transport in the post-war period, as opposed to, say, the history of the Beirut tramway or Lebanese railway, I’d chosen to look for answers in a story with little closure. Many of the central actors of the reconstruction period are either still working in the same field, or, in the case of influential figures like Prime Minister Rafik Hariri who was assassinated in 2005, are emotive or near-taboo subjects. This meant that a major component of my research involved trying to weave together divergent narratives of the present and the recent past.

It is important to emphasise that this approach is simply one way to rethink the activists’ antagonistic approach to the existing transit system; it is not necessarily the only or best approach. Though the ministry’s policy vision allows a greater degree of autonomy for local orderings, and hence, help unsettle the stark divides set up by transport activists, its dominant perspective is still that of the state planner, and not the transport worker. This is a common limitation of policy-directed valorisations of informal transit (see Cervero, 2000) that I seek to move beyond. Hence, in the rest of the chapter, I

The issues Samir Kassir raises in the introduction to his Beirut, a sprawling history of the city, are also pertinent for the writer of the ‘research context’ or ‘historical background’ chapter. How much context is necessary to foreground the research? What exactly is the background needed to make sense of the contemporary phenomena under study here?

I wrote these words in secret, after dark, a long time ago. I hesitated when writing these words.